A mural-restoration journey through the Mogao Caves

Lights Of DunHuang recasts the classic Zuma marble-shooter as the work of an apprentice painter in 11th-century Dunhuang. As Western Xia cavalry closes on Shazhou, you inherit the "Flowing-Light Brush" of the last Color-Sealer and walk cave to cave, restoring sutra illustrations before war can erase them.

Story

Year 1036, Song dynasty. The Guiyi Army is failing; Western Xia horsemen ride toward Shazhou. The last Color-Sealer has died; his brush falls to you. A stroke of color is not paint laid over old paint — it makes the thousand-year pigments flow again. Each mural you restore wakes a painter-spirit, and a sealed story opens.

How it plays

• Flowing-Light Brush — your shooter, fixed at the heart of each cave. Aim, fire, swap the next pigment-ball.

• Apsara Ribbons — pigment-balls travel along ribbons that are also the murals' composition lines.

• Color-Setting — three or more same-colored balls fuse and dissolve into pigment. Eliminate to paint.

• Overlapping Dye — chains deepen shade by shade; the higher your combo, the richer the bloom.

• Spalling Gap — track's end is where the mural peels. Let the chain fall in and the painting dies.

• Sutra-Light Ignition — clear a cave's pigment and the gray line-drawing floods into full color, gold sweeps across, a painter-spirit rises.

Six mineral pigments

Cinnabar · Orpiment · Malachite-Green · Lapis-Lazuli · Lac-Purple · Clam-Shell-White — six historical Dunhuang pigments, each with its own spectral behavior.

Tool balls mid-chain

Slow retards the stream · Reverse rolls it backward · Bomb shatters a cluster.

Ten cave sutras across six chapters

• Chapter 1 — Caves 275 (King Sivi's Offering) & 257 (Nine-Colored Deer)

• Chapter 2 — Caves 249 (Flying Apsaras) & 285 (Immortals)

• Chapter 3 — Caves 420 (Bodhisattva) & 57 (Beauty Guanyin)

• Chapter 4 — Caves 220 (Western Pure Land) & 217 (Amitayurdhyana Sutra)

• Chapter 5 — Cave 61 (Mount Wutai Map)

• Chapter 6 — Cave 3 (Thousand-Handed Avalokiteshvara)